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of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm ofnecessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basicprerequisite. (Marx and Engels 1975/2005, 37:807)

But Kojeve could with even more force refer to Marxs Economic and Philosophic

Manuscripts of 1844, where he ironically attributes to Hegel, in spite of the latters

explicit argument, the very thesis that Kojeve later seeks to add to Hegels teaching:

abstraction comprehending itself as an abstraction knows itself to be nothing: it

must abandon itself*/abandon abstraction*/and so arrives at an entity which is its

exact contrary*/at nature. Thus, [Hegels] entire Logic is the demonstration that

abstract thought is nothing in itself; that only Nature is something(Marx and Engels

1978, 122).2

It is from Marx that Kojeve draws his idea of a finite history and thus of an

eschatological, or messianic, moment that would not simply sublate the currentstate of affairs, but would more radically destroy it and liberate the place for

something else. But of course, unlike Marx, Kojeve interprets this something else

in a demobilizing, liberal sense. One of the reasons for this interpretation was that

Kojeve, unlike Marx, was mostly interested in grand historical movements and had

little interest in the everyday functioning of the capitalist economy and culture,

where the antagonism between work and leisure as well as messianic, eschatological

structures are constantly reproduced, even provided the political recognition of

workers and the blurring of classes in the West.

In this article, I present an analysis of Marxs theory of time. To start with, I speakof Walter Benjamins project of tracing messianic structures in everyday

experience. I then argue that such structures remain ubiquitous in todays culture,

forming the consciousness of history as well as the more mundane forms of

experiencing time such as leisure, fatigue, and the forms of relating to the larger

world that are constituted by modern media. I move to Marxs theoretical work and,

in particular, to the theory of time that is essential to his analysis and critique of

modern political economy. Building on the twentieth centurys theories of finite

temporality, namely those of Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, I show that

Marxs theory of labor, like his theory of history, draws on messianic logic. There isnothing mysterious in this logic: it derives from the gap between the discrete and the

continuous aspects of time and consists in the supplementary character of the time

required to endtime or to finish a certain temporal period.

Prosaic Messianism in Walter Benjamin

Messianic structures are present not only in political ideologies but also in everyday

practices, or in the material apparatuses of the ideologies. One instance of suchstructures is the contemporary public sphere. This sphere is structured in such a way

as to make one constantly expect, and regularly get, breaking news, even of the

2. The proximity of Marxs argument to Kojeves is striking; it may be proof of an unconsciousinfluence. TheEconomic and Philosophic Manuscriptswere published by D. B. Riazanov in Berlinin 1932, and Kojeve must have read them by 1946 when he composed his messianicfootnote.

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most banal sort. This practice induces an anxious state of short attention spans and

agitation as a dominant social mood. Walter Benjamin (see note 1) was an author who

thematized the concept of messianism and gave to it an innovative, secular meaning:

he paid special attention to the messianism and eschatology of everyday life. Since

the end of the 1920s, Benjamin had convertedto Marxism and attempted to unite

it with his earlier interest in Judaic messianism. In his mature works, such as The

Arcades Project (1999a) and On Some Motives in Baudelaire (1968), 155/200),

Benjamin treated the life of society as a totality and showed how the economic

structures were mirrored in the cultural ones. Among these cultural activities,

Benjamin gave special attention to leisure activities, particularly gambling and

flanerie, which he often refers to, in German, as Muiggang leisurely walking. In

The Arcades Project (1999a), a special section (Convolute M) is dedicated to

leisure (die Mue), which is consistently distinguished from flanerie (der

Musiggang).

One particular focus of Benjamins work was mass aesthetics. In his article The

Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin described the

sensationalism of contemporary mass culture (both the media and the film) as based

on the effects of violent and blindingshocksthat destroy the distance between the

text and the reader, or spectator (1968, 217/51). In this text, he suggested that the

subject of such shocks would gradually become habituated to them and the art would

dissolve into life, thus fulfilling the old Utopian program of the Romantics. When

everything becomes shock, there is no shock any longer, but a genuine vision of theworld. This logic of habituation to emergency that becomes ubiquitous, is also

used by Benjamin with regard to surrealist poetry (where, he says, the alarm clock

rings sixty seconds per minute [1999b, 221]) and history written large. In his last text,

On the Concept of History,Benjamin criticizes the fascist tendency toward turning

each moment into a state of exception, but he also insists, throughout the text, that

eachmoment of thenow-time(Jetztzeit), each generation, istrulyendowed with

aweak messianic power,an exceptional and urgent mission to redeem the failures

of the past (1968, 254). This routine messianism, under the condition of being

actual (wirklich), constitutes for Benjamin a possible, positive program for theMarxist left.

One important aspect of Benjamins concept of shock is its intimate connection to

destruction. Thus, in a postscript to The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction,he presentswaras an apotheosis of the aestheticization of politics.

Humanity, he says,has reached such a degree of self-alienation that it lives its own

destruction as an aesthetical enjoyment of the first rank (350/1). Benjamin makes

clear that this destruction is not the ultimate culmination of history or life; it is rather

a brusque interruption. In Theories of German Fascism, Benjamin compares

German protofascist writers who praise war and destruction to a schoolboy wholongs for an inkblot in place of his wrong answer (1999b, 316). But destruction is

sometimes described by Benjamin with sympathy. Thus, in the Theologico-Political

Fragment (1986), 312/3), he speaks of the hidden complicity of profane happiness

with spiritual, messianic redemption. Happiness is again defined here not simply as a

goal, but as the ruin (Untergang) of earthly existence, and it is only as such ruin that it

contributes to the messianic. The messianickingdomisnot the goal but the end

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of history, meaning its brusque interruption. It is easy to see the proximity of

Benjamins argument to the earlier quoted observations of Marx and Kojeve on the

finitude of history, and its simple negation, at the moment of fulfillment.

Benjamins theses On the Concept of History refer to a little hunchback who

represents theology and who pulls the strings of a puppet called historical

materialism. He shows that the irreducible theological element of historical

materialism is nothing but finitude, finitude of human time in particular, which is

ignored by mainstream liberal historicism, with its Newtoniantime understood as a

homogeneous and infinite movement toward progress. However, as is seen from thesis

9, the truth of this progress and the moving force of this time is, in fact, also

finitude:a storm is blowing from Paradise . . .This storm is what we call progress

(1968, 258). On the other hand, thenow-time(Jetztzeit), which we can value only

if we are aware of times finitude, has not a destructive but, contrarily, a salutary

meaning: it fulfills the hopes of the past (thesis 2) by supplementing, completing, and

(for now) ending history (thesis 18). It appears therefore that finitude, in this text of

Benjamin, splits into two meanings. One, the inauthentic and unconscious one, is the

finitude of destruction, which can be unconscious (as in the case of historicism with

itstelos) or conscious (as in fascism, which is in a hurry to accomplish the telosahead

of time and enjoys destruction for its own sake). Opposed to this is authentic, prosaic

finitude, which comes as an interruption of the destructive movement.

Marxism and the Messianic Structures of Everyday Life

Developing Benjamins critique of mass culture and media, but substituting an

apocalyptic mood for Benjamins Utopian one, Paul Virilio (2000) terms the shocking

effect of the media an information bomb.The explosionof this bomb is based

on the messianic temporality of information: ones constant attention to news, mails,

phone calls, in apocalyptic anxiety and/or Utopian hope. This, of course, is a prosaic

messianism, like that described by Benjamin: breaking news come every hour.

Advertised commodities systematically refer to fulfillment of ones dreamswhile the medical advertisement insistently threatens one with mortal diseases and

induces anxious hypochondria, thus simultaneously selling the symbolic protection of

danger and the danger itself. The malls that sell the dream-fulfilling commodities are

fashioned as luxurious palaces that make one feel the fullness and overabundant

totality of Utopia. If the labor-centered economy was messianic in theProtestant

or evenJudaicway, in the senses of orientation to future redemption and deferred

enjoyment, then the consumer-driven economy is rather Catholic or even

pseudo-Marxist if we think of Marxs preference for leisure over labor (one

instance of which was quoted above). Here rest, leisure, and Sunday are,ideologically, more interesting than the labor of the weekday. The present or the

immediate future (right now), not the future (at some moment), is messianic

here.

All this is known and obvious. It is mentioned here to introduce the problem of

applying Marxs philosophy of history and time to the present moment*/the moment

where Marxism, as I described above, seems discredited because of the failure of

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really existing socialism but also because of the seeming depoliticization and

demobilization of society, and the fusion between the working class and bourgeoisie

(the two last arguments already presented by Kojeve).

It may appear that Marxism does not need to be particularly reframed. First, Marxs

analysis of capitalism, of class struggle, of the constant need to increase exploitation

and the pauperization of masses, of the alienation of labor, holds literally true today

if we consider capitalism on the global, rather than national, level. (Indeed, if class

tension and polarization seem to have been largely moderated inside the countries of

theNorth,they have grown only more intense on the level of the global division of

labor.) Second, the contemporary shift of ideological focus from labor to consump-

tion, from ideological debates to political advertisement and political entertainment,

was, in a way, anticipated by Marx in his theory of commodity fetishism. This critical

side holds. But what is more problematic is Marxs philosophy of history, which was

openly messianic. Marx anticipated, in a relatively near future, a global revolution led

by the proletariat. This revolution would bring about a radically new state of affairs

where necessary labor would be minimized and, in their free time, humans would give

themselves to the creative activity of self-formation. Things would look in a

paradoxical manner characteristic of genuine Utopias: necessary time would cease,

and there would only remain excessive time (with nothing more to exceed).

Capitalism, to Marx and Engels, was carrying inside it the seeds of its own sublation,

of radical transformation into something entirely different, a society without

property, families or professions. Early Soviet revolutionaries tried to realize thisUtopian program in the 1920s, but were rapidly stopped by the new bureaucratic

class. This is not to say that all Utopian elements were blocked during the Stalin era,

but precisely the emancipatory social Utopias were. Avant-garde art was supplanted

by a new classicism, experiments aimed at the destruction of families were stopped,

Constructivist architecture gave way to pompously decorated palaces for the elite,

and labor was officially celebrated (for instance, in the case of the Stakhanov

movement) rather than seen as something to overcome. Utopia itself gave way to a

comforting ideology, or fantasy, of the social harmony and abundance to come.

Messianic logic was replaced by the logic of telos.Western revolutionaries of 1968 were more successful in realizing some of the

Utopian elements formulated by Marx and other nineteenth-century socialists, but

only to the extent that these Utopias concerned thesuperstructureof capital (such

as sexual freedom, womens self-affirmation, freedom of expression, and free

education). These victories have now been partly mitigated by the authoritarian

counterturn of the 1980s, partly appropriated by capital, and deprived of their

messianic/Utopian content. Thus, it appears that the messianic element persists in

modernity but does so in the routine way predicted by Benjamin. This routine way

consists in consumption, understood, first, in the usual way as purchasing commod-ities, and second, in the sense of destruction, as in terrorist and counterterrorist

spectacular violence.

This condition where the messianic survives in prosaic form was already the object

and impulse of Marxs thought. His early writings on the philosophy of history start

with reflections on a certain end and exhaustion (reflections inspired by something

more than the supposed completion of philosophy by Hegel). Thus, in the case of



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Germany he analyzes itsposthumoussituation:The modern ancien regime is the

comedian of a world order whose real heroes are dead(in Marx and Engels 1978, 57).

Marx shows the futility of religious and philosophical critique of the present regime as

an ideological project. For Germany, the criticism of religion has been largely

completed(53). But the oppressive regime that had been legitimated by this religion

nevertheless persists, in its mute and deaf obscenity, even deprived of its higher

legitimization. Thus, says Marx, posthistorical Germany participates in history, only

sharingin the restorations without ever sharing in . . .revolutions (55).

The excessive, superfluous condition of the proletariat mirrors the excessiveness

and superfluity of the old regime. Proletariat can convert its excessive existence into

the destruction of the regime and make a leap into the new communist life, where its

sheer, indeterminate existence in the zone of societys self-dissolution would be

universalized and turned into a propertyless and classless society. The proletariat

itself would be sublated (aufgehoben) in the process (65).

Jacques Derrida, in his Specters of Marx, does justice to this aspect of Marxs

teaching. He pays special attention to the anachronistic nature of the historical

condition described by Marx. The latter is full of survivorsor spectersfrom the

past and the promises of the unprepared future. Turning Marxs philosophy of history

against the static reading of his messianism by Kojeve and Fukuyama, Derrida writes

thatin the same place, on the same limit, where history is finished, where a certain

determined concept of history comes to an end, precisely there the historicity of

history begins, there finally it has the chance of heralding itself (1994, 74). ForDerrida, themessianismof our time is oriented to the future. It contains a promise

that, in a sense, will never be realized qua present, but is important precisely as an

opening toward the new and the other, the democracy-to-come.

Free Time and Surplus Labor in Marxs Mature Thought

The focus on, and the interest in, structures of excessive time are central not just for

Marxs early revolutionary manifestos, but also for his mature writings on politicaleconomy. The central concept in his explanation of the functioning of capital is

surplus labor time, due to which labor exceeds the measure that would have been

equivalent to the wage paid the worker by the capitalist. In contrast to surplus labor

time, Marx frequently speaks of free or disposable time, time for play and

creativity that is stolen by capitalists and that would be increased and emphasized, so

far as possible, in an eventually communist society. Communism is presented by Marx

as the state ofrestin two senses of the word: not in that of immobility, but in the

sense of both a remainder (surplus of time and of labor) and leisure, which would

provide space for creativity and free self-formation of a subject.

Leisure

Here, drawn from Volume 1 ofCapital,are Marxs most characteristic statements on

the constitutive role of leisure.

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Marx to Fourier, vividly reminds us of todays postmodern theories of immaterial

work. Marx, for whom free time overcomes and sublates labor via an Aufhebung,

thinks of it as a privative cessation of work rather than as works playfulness. Marx is

therefore closer to someone like Andre Gorz, who accepts the inevitability of labor

but seeks to subordinate it to the values and structure of free time.

Free time, being a concept seemingly derivative with regard to work or its obverse

side, appears ultimately to be constitutiveof it (at least as human, project-oriented

work). The whole process is viewed backward and the meaning of work is set through

its ending, which precisely destroys the works meaning and renders it void. Moreover,

it may be implied that free time, time taken in its pure form, is constitutive of time as

such: time appears as such only when it is completed and ousted into the past.

However, one should not view free time metaphysically, as an intellectual intuition of

pure form. The constitutive status of free time, as will be shown below, depends onits status as excess and surplus: it isfree,but it is stilltime. The processes with which

time had beenbusycannot be stopped at once, and free time is defined by rest:

the survival of motion its purpose had been completed. The source of the particular

activity of leisure is both the inertia of motion and the drive of liberating time from

this inertia, of being completely at rest.

Therefore, the obverse of the concept of disposable time, for Marx, is surplus

labor, which refers precisely to the workone performs in addition to the work that is

absolutely necessary. Marx shows that in chapter 10 of volume 1 of Capital that,

structurally, a worker volunteers to work in his or her spare time, even if she or he isnot conscious of this. [I]n its blind unrestrainable passion, its were-wolf hunger for

surplus labor, capital oversteps not only the moral but even the merely physical

maximum bounds of the working day. It usurps the time for growth, development, and

healthy maintenance of the body (Marx and Engels 1975/2005, 270).

Free time and surplus labor are distributed by the sides of the division of labor.

The free time of the non-working parts of society is based on the surplus labour or

overwork, the surplus labour time, of the working part(Marx and Engels 1975/2005,

30:190/2). However, the liberation of time even for a part of society is in principle a

positive development; it creates the potential for a future society of free time.In chapter 21 of the manuscript Theories of Surplus Labor, Marx discusses in

detail an anonymous treatise by an Owenite socialist (and at the same time a

Ricardian economist), calledThe Source and the Remedy of National Difficulties.3

It is from this remarkable pamphlet that Marx quotes, several times, a strong formula:

Wealth is disposable time, and nothing more (Marx and Engels 1975/2005,

32:391/2). Marx sympathizes with this formula, and it is from this treatise that, in

all probability, he takes up the term disposable time.4 He also quotes the authors

positive project.

3. Today it is known that the author of the pamphlet was Charles Wentworth Dilke (1789/1864),a British critic and writer of liberal orientation.4. Marx often prefers disposable time to free time because, as he shows in chapter 8 ofCapital, capitalists often give workers pauses and breaks where they must always be ready at thecapitalists disposal. True leisure is that where a worker can dispose of his or her own time, planon it.

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If everybody has to work, if the contradiction between those who have towork too much and those who are idlers disappears*/and this would in anycase be the result of capital ceasing to exist, of the product ceasing toprovide a title to aliensurplus labour*/and if, in addition, the development

of the productive forces brought about by capitalism is taken into account,society will produce the necessary abundance in six hours, [producing] morethan it does now in twelve, and, moreover, all will have six hours ofdisposable time,that is, real wealth; time which will not be absorbed indirect productive labour, but will be available for enjoyment, for leisure,thus giving scope for free activity and development, time as scope for thedevelopment of mans faculties, etc. The economists themselves justify theslave-labour of the wage-labourers by saying that it creates leisure, freetime for others, for another section of society*/and thereby also forthe society of wage-labourers. (32:391)

This project is, in fact, very close to Marxs own, except that the author clearly

believes in the peaceful, evolutionary transformation of capitalism, while Marx insists

that the present economy would simply not work this way at all. The whole system

should be rebuilt in a revolutionary way, and free time itself is understood by Marx as

revolutionary and redemptive.

It is self-evident that if labour-time is reduced to a normal length and,furthermore, labour is no longer performed for someone else, but formyself, and, at the same time, the social contradictions between master and

men, etc., being abolished [Aufhebung], it acquires a quite different, a freecharacter, it becomes real social labour, and finally the basis of disposabletime*/thelabourof a man who has also disposable time, must be of a muchhigher quality than that of the beast of burden. (32:392)

Surplus Labor

We have seen by now that, for Marx, capital exploits specifically human, free or pure

temporality in the form of the surplus labor. There is an internal contradictionbetween overwork and increase in leisure, which is distributed into the two poles of

class struggle.

It is only due to surplus labor that capital may exist at all. But if this is so, then it

appears that surplus labor is productive of surplus value not only in relative terms (the

part of labor that exceeds the needs of material reproduction of labor power), but

also in an absolute sense: surplus value is a product of surplus time, of the internal

excess of human existence that is leisure. Only surplus time and surplus labor are

truly creative, and self-expanding capital is a transformed form of this leisurely

excess of humans.In spite of the centrality of the concept of surplus labor time, one cannot say that

its content is quite clearly presented by Marx. It is obscured, it appears, by the

oscillation between metaphorical, or even politico-theological, interpretation and

seeminglyrealist,rationalist interpretation. Unlike his early texts, inCapitalMarx

mostly employs theological and metaphysical language to describe the inadequate

self-presentation, the inherently deceptive appearance of the capitalist economy.



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Nevertheless this language, even considered as metaphorical, plays a constitutive

role in Marxs argument.

Marx explains the existence of surplus value in two ways. First, the time that the

worker is actually able to work is much longer than is needed for the reproduction

of his capacity to work (such as food, drinking, and sleeping). The difference between

the actual working day and the necessary labor time is precisely the surplus labor

time (Marx and Engels 1975/2005, 35:196/208). Thus, the capitalist buys not the

labor itself but the labor power, which exceeds its own measure*/is extendable,

stretchable in time. From theofficialviewpoint of the capitalist, time is linear and

measurable, but in fact, time is a continuum and its border is indeterminate.

This is where surplus labor and, consequently, surplus value come from. Marx

presents their emergence in a dramatic way, making the capitalist smile and

provide the worker with the material for a twelve-hour working day instead of the sixhours that are necessary.[T]he surplus-value results only from a quantitative excess

of labor, from a lengthening-out of one and the same labor-process(35:208). In fact,

there is no separate time when the worker produces surplus value: it is continuously

producedthroughout the work time, as far as it exceeds the necessary minimum.

The second explanation of surplus value, with regard to a working day, concerns the

relationship of labor to constant capital, or the means of production that are

accumulated by the capitalist for the workers labor. By working, says Marx, the

worker does two jobs at once: [The worker] is unable to add new labor, to create

new value, without at the same time preserving old values (35:216). Therefore hiswork,by virtue of its goal-oriented form, preserves and transfers to the product the

value of the means of production,so thathe at the same time, by the mere act of

working, creates each instant an additional or new value (35:218). Living labor

must seize upon these things and rouse them from their death-sleep(35:193). This

process of resurrection follows from the aspect of consumption that is inherent in

work. The raw materials areconsumed, used upin thefire of laborand thus

appropriated as part and parcel of labors organism (35:193).

Consumption

Marx frequently uses the wordconsumption(Konsumtion) in the sense of negation

and destruction. This corresponds to the original meaning of the word which, in Latin

as well as in German, originally means the process of wear and tear brought by time.

In fact, this process is already an instance of the rather mysterious force of timeas a

separate agent (strictly speaking, time can destroy nothing, but is simply an

abstraction of various processes that bring destruction due to the very fact ofmoving), the opposite ofcapital,which seems to growfrom the sheer force of time.

The link of consumption to the fireof labor may also suggest a contamination of

consumption with consummation, a contamination that happened in the French

language, so that la consommation came to mean consumption as well as

accomplishment (thus,consommation du mariageis the first sexual act of a married

couple).

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Messianic Surplus Labor

Let me return to the second meaning of surplus value: transformation of constant

capital into variable capital. The double function of a workers labor*/

production ofnew value and, at the same time, preservation of old value*/means that in the sphere

of work, time does not follow the unidirectional, continuous model. In laboring, one

is constantly going back and forth in time. Time is, then, discrete; it implies constant

new beginnings or constant recapitulations, such as those performed by the worker in

relation to capital. Or, rather, there is a double optics: the capitalist and the state

view time as linear and continuous while, in fact, sustenance of this linearity and

continuity is possible only due to labor and its mysterious capacity to constantly

resurrect the past. But, in this case, says Marx, the worker does not literallydo any

surplus labor: theresurrectionof the dead past comes automatically with the factof labor itself, as a gratuitous gift (Marx and Engels 1975/2005, 35:217).

Thus, in both explanations of surplus value, we deal with the strange, nonclassical

nature of time, which is responsible for the even stranger, self-increasing character of

labor and the seemingly metaphysical qualities of the whole system of capital. What

is there in human labor that makes this possible? Marx, speaking of the specificity of

human labor, speaks of its being project-oriented*/of its ideality:what distinguishes

the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises

this structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every

labor-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at

its commencement (35:187).

But it remains unclear how this project orientation and ideality actually lead to the

excessiveness of labor that produces surplus value. One hypothesis that comes to

mind is that the real working time is logically finished, accomplished, while the

official time just formally and externally subdivides time into quantitative units.

Bergson (1991) opposes these two types of temporality to each other as theduree

and spatialized, inauthentic time. If we apply this distinction to Marxs subject

matter, we will see that spatialized time in the Bergsonian sense is totallyexternal to the content of labor and would thus finish it at an arbitrary moment,

midway. From the point of view of this spatialized time, the human worker will

always exceed the official measure because she or he has to take care of the totality

of his or her work, of its accomplishment. The time she or he needs is the time of

completion.

Because human labor is intelligent, substantive, it includes an effort of holding the

totality of labor in mind, or constantly recapitulating the past and anticipating the

future. This time, again, is not linear but rather spiral-like. And, even more directly,

the accomplished nature of labor time, in relation to its abstract measure in the

capitalist state, requires a special work of completion which must go beyond the

limits of the measured time and constitute a surplus time needed to finish time! Thus,

for example, I am writing this text late in the night, not because I badly need it ready

tomorrow but because the internal logic of writing pushes me to continue, fearing

that next day I will forget certain motives, lose inspiration, and so on. Moreover, I will

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than have the millenarians about the day of judgment, isall bosh . . .Whenever your

last hour strikes in earnest, think of the Oxford Professor [Senior]. And now,

gentlemen, farewell, and may we meet again in yonder better world, but not

before (35:236/7).

At another juncture Marx mentions, and fiercely rejects, the following argument in

defense of capitalists. He quotes a factory inspector who says, It is sometimes

advanced by way of excuse, when persons are found at work in a factory, either at a

meal hour, or at some illegal time, that they will not leave the mill at the appointed

hour, and that compulsion is necessary to force them to cease work [cleaning their

machinery, & c.], especially on Saturday afternoons (35:249). Or another, similar

story of gentlemen who were

accused of having kept at work 5 boys between 12 and 15 years of age, from6 a.m. on Friday to 4 p.m. on the following Saturday, not allowing them anyrespite except for meals and one hour for sleep at midnight . . . The accusedgentlemen affirm in lieu of taking an oath*/as quakers they were tooscrupulously religious to take an oath*/that they had, in their greatcompassion for the unhappy children, allowed them four hours for sleep,but the obstinate children absolutely would not go to bed. (35:249)

Of course, the cynicism of capitalists is justly denounced by Marx here. But, on

second thought, is the story so unbelievable?5 Marxs own early theory of alienation

assumes that the more creative labor and enthusiasm the worker puts into the

product that is subsequently taken from him or her, the more she or he is alienated.

It is quite plausible that workers would sometimes keep working beyond the working

time, through sheer inertia, so that it would take more effort to stop working than

to continue working. In our times, capitalist exploitation of white-collar workers (or

immaterial workers, in the parlance of Paolo Virno and Antonio Negri) often

functions precisely in this way: the more initiative and creativity the work requires,

the fewer limits there are for this work (which is still ultimately dictated and

expropriated by capital). If the worker tends to keep working after the work hasended, perhaps to finish the work once started or even simply to terminate work

(this also requires work!), he or she is immediately caught in the structure of

surplus labor, whether she or he stops working or continues working for a while. In

any case, the capitalist finds a way of using the workers surplus effort and the end

of work brings a sense of dissatisfaction, the inability of the worker to fully distance

him- or herself from the working day, to fully enter the free time that Marx so

desired.

5. The fact that Marx mentions the argument on the workers fanatic desire to work showsthat he was not unaware of this structural function, which would support his own theory. But,fearing a toowildor too ambivalent presentation, he used them only in rejecting them, usinga figure that Freud would later call denegation, denial(Verneinung). Marx uses these andother images to create a complex critique of the metaphysics of capital, but he does so in anonthematic way, without taking responsibility for them. Compare Derrida (1994) on theambivalence of Marx toward the ghosts: the metaphoric and metaphysical figures of his owntext.

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Generally, the fatigue of which Marx writes so eloquently (for instance, chapter 10

of volume 1 ofCapital,The Working-Day,abounds with examples of the exhaustion

of humans by work)6 is far from being a natural condition. It involves rather the

active effort of a human being to interrupt the inertia of an activity that feels

threateningly long. It is an effort of self-hindering that is akin to Freuds death

drive.7

One fully feels the fatigue only after having stopped working. There can be

pleasantand unpleasantfatigue: the first implying a sense of accomplishment,

the second bearing the burden of an untimely interruption. This is a phenomenon one

knows from experience: we can often mobilize and work unusually long without

increasingly losing force or feeling a continuously increasing fatigue. Rather, the

fatigue, which is proportional to the degree of overwork, comes all at once, at the

moment we finally decide to stop, or at least want to stop, in spite of an externalpressure to continue.

The weariness of workers, as described by Marx, is not just a feature of their

physical state. It is mediated byalienation:workers are badly tired because they fail,

on the one hand, to accomplish and appropriate and, on the other hand, to expel

what they have produced. Alienation includes, to develop Marx once more, not only

the failure to appropriate ones products and labor but, equally, the failure to

objectify and move it to the past, to let the dead bury their dead.

6. See also Rabinbach on the popularity of anxiety about fatigue in the nineteenth century.However, all Rabinbachs examples involve a naively naturalist theory of fatigue, ignoring itsreflexive character. The obsession with fatigue in the nineteenth-centurys thought was not

merely a sign of the real weariness of individuals in industrial society, but of the negativeaspect of the body conceived as a thermodynamic machine capable of conserving and deployingenergy . . . Resistance to work was no longer located in the souls impurities, but in the physicalproperties of fatigue (Rabinbach 1990, 48). This naturalist theory is also connected, for

instance in Helmholz, with a navely naturalist theory of time. However, I would emphasize less

the naturalization and materialism of nineteenth-century ideology (which is obviously there, butis not that surprising), and more its crypto-messianism, which is so well denuded by Nietzsche inhis critique of the second law of thermodynamics as a metaphysical prejudice. Moreover,naturalism and materialism, which assume the spirits externalization and disappearance innature, are, in a sense, a necessary disguise of the suicidal passion of fatigue. As Benjaminrepeatedly showed, melancholia, as a sense of alienation from meaning, has a particulartendency to present meanings in a purely material, corporeal fashion.7. A concept introduced by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud 1955, 18:7/64). Atthis moment of developing his theory, Freud understood that negative emotions, aggressionagainst others and oneself are not just inert reactions to obstacles driven essentially by the willand taste of pleasure, but effects of an active forcesui generis. Therefore, instead of his prior

concepts of pleasure principle and reality principle (an essentially passive adaptation toenvironment), he introduces a dyad of equally active principles, life drive and death drive.Unlike a simple desire, which would have a determinate goal, the death and life drives areinherently infinite, insatiable. The death drive has only total destruction as its goal, which it cannever reach. Both drives are therefore infinite springs of human behavior. By introducing them,Freud rejects a simplistic view of human psychic economy as driven by a desire for balance andhomeostasis. In fact, the very force that can restore homeostasis actually exceeds it and reachesbeyond it.



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Alienation as Blockage of the Messianic

As we know, for Hegel, the notion of alienation (Entfremdung) had an ambivalent

meaning: a human beingmustexternalize itself (entauern sich) in order to affirm its

being and avoid the empty longing of an unhappy consciousness.But, after having

done so, it runs into the opposite trap: the most important things now happen in the

externalized, alienated sphere of objectified culture and science. Only a new,

Kantian morality, a secularized Christianity, and Hegels speculative philosophy help

to appropriate and interiorize this objective culture back into the individual and

collective subject.

Marx, in the Economical and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, his main work on

alienation, seems to take a much more unilateral view. The so-called externalization,

he says, is just a cover-up for theloss:a worker loses what she or he produces, loses apart of him- or herself in the process, and the result is existence in a world of alien

objects, comparable to a Christian notion of kenosis or a clinical picture of

melancholia or depression.The more the worker spends himself, the more powerful

the alien objective world becomes which he creates over against himself, the poorer

he himself*/his inner world, the less belongs him as his own(Marx and Engels 1978,

72).

But does this mean that Marx only longs for an appropriation of the world by

humans and does not see the need to transcend ones borders and go outside oneself?

This is not so, as is seen from the concluding sections where Marx turns to thediscussion of Hegels minor Logic. Here Hegel is criticized, not for his apology for

estrangement, but for proposing a false solution to this estrangement*/namely, the

appropriation of the external object in knowledge. Marx criticizes Hegel not for an

apology for externalization but, on the contrary, for not being able truly to transcend

bland interiority. Marx reads Hegel against the grain and shows that, at the end of the

Logic,there is a hidden movement that goes against the general meaning of Hegels

system: namely, the movement that annuls thought and transcends to Nature. Let me

quote again the passage I quoted above with regard to Kojeve:[T]he entire logic is a

demonstration that abstract thought is nothing in itself; that the Absolute Idea isnothing in itself; that only Nature is something (Marx and Engels 1978, 122). A

striking interpretation of Hegels negation as full annulment, not Aufhebung!Hegels

abstraction, says Marx,

resolves under various conditions to abandon itself and to replace its self-absorption, nothingness, generality and indeterminateness by its other-being, the particular, and the determinate; resolves to let nature, which itheld hidden in itself only as an abstraction, as a thought-entity, go freelyfrom itself . . .The mystical feeling which drives the philosopher forwardfrom abstract thinking to intuiting is boredom*/the longing for a content.(123)

Hegel fails to find a successful way out of this self-absorption, but Marxs

communism is such a way. Marx writes, Atheism and communism are no flight, no

abstraction; they are not a losing of the objective world begotten by man*/of mans

essential powers given over to the realm of objectivity; they are not returning in

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poverty to unnatural, primitive simplicity. On the contrary, they are but the first real

coming-to-be, the realization become real for man, of mans essence*/of the essence

of man as something real (123).

Thus, communism appears as a response not only to the inevitable self-

objectification of man, but also to the false appropriation of the object in Hegels

system which, historically, corresponds to the false appropriation of the object in the

system of private property. Private property is false property; it idealizes the object

but fails to truly externalize the man or humanize the object. Overcoming alienation

means opposing a true, full negation as annulment (passage from Spirit to Nature), to

the compromised negation that is Hegels Aufhebung. Aufhebung is a kind of

indigestion of history, to speak in Nietzschean terms, and Marx no less than Nietzsche

is preoccupied with dropping the dead weight of the past and truly transcending the

subject. Marxs preferred type of the eschatological negation, at least as it appears in

the early text of 1844, is neither a spectacular destruction nor a Hegelian

redemption-recapitulation, but a passage to the irreducible Other, the reunion of

humans with the nature that they had foreclosed. This understanding helps to clarify

Marxs concept of alienation which, against appearances, refers not only to an

overexpenditure of self but, equally, to loneliness and the separation of humans from

each other and from nature.8

In our day, the destructive aspect of messianic time is moderated by commodity

consumption. To some extent, as Marx already saw, this is not true consumption

because it is not sufficiently destructive, so far as things, even the basest things liketoilet paper, function as objects valuable in themselves, with a name, character, and

a place in the household. In todays consumer economy, goods are often criticized for

not being as durable as they had been; for example computers and operating systems

are constantly renovated to force one to constantly buy new ones. This destructive

and spending consumption is, however, only an Ersatz of a truly radical messianic

consumption that would consist, for instance, in producing a highly durable computer

and setting free the armies of workers and technologists across the world, so that

they might play video games the rest of their time. The drive to end and destroy,

which is thus moderated in the consumer economy, is satisfied in televisedcatastrophes and terrorist acts, produced through a symbiosis between the media

and the most consequent consumers and telespectators, the terrorists.

Conclusion

Thus, we see that Marxs ideas of surplus value and surplus labor are more than

merely empirical findings, or minor corrections of traditional political economy. They

draw on a philosophical analysis of time which puts into question the classicaleconomic theories based on outdated, narrowly rationalist models of time and space

(these models are provided by the understanding, in the Kantian sense of the word).

While these models are obviously similar to theological concepts of time, Marx and

8. See a similar understanding in Madra (2006, 208), quoting the Community EconomiesCollective.



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other twentieth-century thinkers who use this concept do not wish to retheologize

the world but, rather, strive to understand rationally the crucial elements of the

religious world-view that have been ignored by modern science, but which never-

theless are highly relevant to orientation in the contemporary world. Moreover,

messianic phenomena seem the more irrational, the more dominant is the rationalist

model of extensively infinite and calculable time. Marxs notion of surplus time is

structural, not purely ontological. Therefore, it points to the Utopian possibility of

destroying the very dual structure of necessity and surplus and searches for a

form of synthesis between labor and leisure.

Therefore, the apparent end of messianic historical consciousness is far from being

a reason to leave Marx in the past, even with regret. What Marx tried to show was that

the end of messianism, the end of Utopias, is built into these very Utopias. Thus, not

arguing against Derridas orientation at the unknown, transcendent future but rather

going in another direction, I would suggest that Marxs teaching today is valuable as a

teaching of the immanence of Utopia. Utopias were over already in Marxs time,

and this was the beginning of the radical politics of the truly modern kind. Our

messianic energies are exploited and caricatured by authoritarian capitalism, but

they are all already there, and a catastrophe will immediately raise them to the

surface. This messianism does not consist in a simple will to finish and destroy, but

rather in the mission of replaying what has already been destroyed, for the very

lasttime. Perhaps the next*/andthe very last*/revolution will give us a chance

to institutionalize and universalize these energies, as Marx wanted, by synthesizingwork and play into something new, and by destroying their fatal division into vain and

unproductive labor and the industrialized leisure of working out.

References

Agamben, G. 2005. The time that remains: A commentary on the Letter to theRomans. Trans. P. Dailey. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Benjamin, W. 1968. Illuminations. New York: Schocken.*/*/*/. 1986. Reflections. New York: Schocken.*/*/*/. 1999a. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.*/*/*/. 1999b. Selected writings. Vol. 2, 1927/1934. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard

University Press.Bataille, G. 1988. The accursed share. Trans. R. Hurley. New York: Zone Books.Bergson, H. 1991. Matter and memory. New York: Zone books.Buck-Morss, S. 2002. Dreamworld and catastrophe. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Derrida, J. 1994. Specters of Marx. Trans. P. Kamuf. New York: Routledge.

Freud, S. 1955.The standard edition of the complete psychological works of SigmundFreud. ed. J. Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis.

Fukuyama, F. 1992. The end of history and the last man. New York: The Free Press.Holderlin, F. 1977/. Samtliche Werke. Frankfurter Ausgabe. ed. D. E. Sattler.

Frankfurt am Main: Roter Stern.*/*/*/. 1990. Werke, Briefe, Dokumente. Munich: Winkler.Kojeve, A. 1947. Introduction a la lecture de Hegel. Paris: Gallimard.

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Madra, Y. 2006. Questions of communism: Ethics, ontology, subjectivity. RethinkingMarxism18 (2): 205/24.

Magun, A. 2003. The work of leisure: The figure of empty time in the poetics ofHolderlin and Mandelshtam. Modern Language Notes 118 (5): 1152/76.

Mannheim, K. 1936. Ideology and utopia. London: Routledge.Marx, K. 1973. Grundrisse. Trans. M. Nicolaus. New York: Penguin.Marx, K. and F. Engels. 1978.The Marx-Engels reader.ed. R. Tucker. New York: W. W.

Norton.*/*/*/. 1975/2005. Collected works. Moscow: Progress Publishers.Rabinbach, A. 1990.The human motor. Energy, fatigue, and the origins of modernity.

New York: Basic.Schiller, F. 1967. On the aesthetic education of man. Trans. E. Wilkinson and

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